Video games are extremely popular and are enhanced by allowing users to participate in fitness programs, sports programs and gaming programs. Fitness programs may include yoga, tai chi, martial arts and aerobic dance. Sports programs may include baseball, football, tennis and so on. Gaming programs may include adventure scenarios, quests, battle scenarios and so on. Typically, all these programs are interactive and display the users' movements on a screen thereby providing real-time visual feedback to the users.
Specifically, exergaming (also known as fitness game) is an activity that combines fitness programs with game play. The users' movements are incorporated into the flow of action displayed on the screen. Further, during the exergaming program, the user receives real-time feedback and encouragement on his/her progress. Thereby, the user is prompted to work harder and reach personal milestones.
Typically, a human movement can be segmented using a video player, such as in Dartfish sports analysis tool. The start and end frames of the video are marked by the user. Two traditional methods exist for creating human movement scoring system namely, programming of pose recognition rules and by using Microsoft's Visual Gesture Builder (VGB) intelligent development environment (IDE) designed for software developers. Further, there are two main approaches for producing human movement examples for games, namely, animation of 3D avatars and conventional video production. Video production is time-based and it takes a full-scale computer graphics platform to create transitions between end and start poses of a person in different poses at different moments. Further, animation of 3D avatars requires a high amount of effort to specifically animate every move in the system. For instance, in order to produce an animation of “jumping up”, an animator would need to record the movement with a motion capture system after which a programmer would need to program and test triggers to recognize the start of the jump in order to produce nearly real-time animation of the jump done by the avatar. This process requires multiple people with technical expertise and takes days to be complete.
Conventional methods for creating exercise classes are complicated and time-consuming as the process involves a significant amount of iterative programming and testing of pose recognition algorithms as well as video production techniques. Until now, it has been difficult and time-consuming to create example movement sets with pose recognition rules that would work well for all users and acceptable for modern games and exergaming systems.
In light of the above discussion, there appears to be a need for an efficient method to enable new content consisting of scored example movements to be authored with reasonable effort and high level of technical expertise.